


Vanilla-Hazel-what??

by Tseecka



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, First Meetings, Gen, Inspired by Real Events, M/M, Meet-Cute, barista Dorian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-05 09:18:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5369978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tseecka/pseuds/Tseecka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian's closing shift at the cafe is interrupted by the intrusion of a drunken trio of celebratory sports fans, who are very much not where they expected to be. He'd be ready to dismiss them out of hand as annoyances, sent from Hell to make his life just that much more difficult that night, but to his surprise, the biggest and brashest of the three somehow manages to get under his skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vanilla-Hazel-what??

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snefrue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snefrue/gifts), [averyk4](https://archiveofourown.org/users/averyk4/gifts).



> Inspired by real-life events, in which a troupe of very drunk sports fans invaded the cafe I work in, chanting their team name following an epic victory--evidently not realizing that they were in a cafe and NOT in the sports bar next door.

“DRAGONS!”

The noise is loud--loud enough that Dorian jumps, and swears under his breath as he burns his wrist on the steam wand of the espresso machine. The cafe has been quiet for the last hour or so, practically silent except for the clicking and clacking of frantic grad student fingers on the keys of sticky laptops and the sounds of alt rock that should have died out a decade ago on the radio. He pulls the carafe away from the machine and shoves his arm under the tap of the small counter sink, running cool water over the burn, and turns his absolute best glare on the trio of individuals who have just come stumbling in through the door.

They are in various states of uniform disarray, of the sort that only comes along with sporting events; dressed in garish red and silver jerseys, paint smeared over their faces. One of the men, he notes with disdain, has a large fat streak of red across the bridge of his nose. It looks _ridiculous_.

“DRAGONS! DRAGONS! DRAGONS!”

If possible, the chant is growing louder, amplified by the silence of the cafe and redoubled by the echo chamber formed by the now-closed door. Their enthusiasm doesn’t seem to be dampened by the fact that not a single patron of the cafe has joined in their cheer. If anything, they just seem more determined to to make up the difference with the volume of their own voices.

One of the men peels himself away from his comrades, removing a heavy, hairy arm from around his shoulders and reallocating it to the shortest of the three. He stumbles under their friend’s weight--the one with the nose-streak, who seems to be a bit more than three sheets to the wind. The first man, made distinct by his massive size and the fact that he’s currently shirtless with a beer helmet strapped to his head, slams a hand down on the cafe bar. Dorian keeps his arm under the running tap, but he acknowledges the movement with a perfectly arched brow.

“Three of your best beer!” he proclaims, and his friends whoop and holler behind him. He glances back over his shoulder, giving them both a big, toothy grin, and then looks back to Dorian. Dorian, for his point, stares pointedly at the two bottles of beer attached to his head like some kind of awful drunken horns.

“This is a _cafe_ ,” he says archly, finally pulling his arm out of the water. The burn isn’t bad, a strip of red along his skin rather than a welt, but it stings nonetheless. “We don’t serve beer. And outside food and drink isn’t permitted, I’m afraid.”

“Oh--oh shit. No way.” The idiot actually sounds--concerned? Contite? Taken aback, in any case, like he’s only just realized he’s not at the sports bar next door. Dorian’s pretty sure that’s where he intended to be. He looks back at his friends again--both of whom are now facing each other, right in each other’s faces, whooping and guffawing between breathless, eager chants of their team’s name. “Hey--hey! Hawke, Varr--guys!”

Dorian comes up to the bar and folds his arms over his chest. Probably uselessly--they’re likely to leave as soon as they realize his cafe doesn’t serve anything more alcoholic than the bottle of irish cream liquer he keeps under the counter, for the coldest and most bitter of days--but hell, call him an optimist. Maybe they’ll order _something_.

The guy’s taking the helmet off of his head, tucking the straps inside of the shell, and he tucks it awkwardly under one arm as he leans on the bar. Dorian leans back, just a little; but his attention is on his friends, not on the barista. There’s a crudely drawn dragon along the guy’s shoulder blades, in the same red as the streak on Hawke’s nose, and it’s striping down the guy’s broad back in thin rivulets. Dorian can’t help the face he makes as he realizes it’s likely running due to sweat.

“This isn’t the bar,” he’s trying to tell the other two, who seem like they’re trying to pay attention but are just way too drunk to really fully comprehend the words coming out of his mouth. Hawke, at least, seems to get it--at least, he curses, and slurs,

“But we already--we already paid the Uber guy! He took us to the wrong--fuckin’--” He stumbles, and is caught--if barely--by his friend. His arms gesticulate wildly, encompassing the entirety of the cafe in the broad sweep of long, burly, hairy muscle. “Gonna fuckin’ kill ‘im,” he grouses.

The third man pats him solidly on the shoulder before flumping into the chair next to him at the small table. He’s small, but solid, and he doesn’t seem anywhere near as drunk as his friend--but he still starts up another chant of “Dragons!, Dragons!, Dragons!,” seemingly to distract Hawke from his suddenly murderous bent against the Uber driver.

The guy at the bar sighs, turning away as Hawke becomes quite tidily distracted by the chanting. It’s all Dorian can do not to put his fingers to the bridge of his nose. It’s late, after a shift that felt far longer than the seven hours he’s already put in at the cafe, and he’s just about ready to give up all pretense of friendly customer service. Pride, and pride alone, keep him from being utterly unprofessional, and just in time. The big man turns back to Dorian, an apologetic smile on his face that Dorian doesn’t quite trust. “Ah--looks like we took a wrong turn somewhere,” he says, and Dorian is already reaching for the phone.

“I can call you a cab,” he says, biting out the words. He sees the grad student packing up her laptop out of the corner of his eye, and can’t blame her for wanting to get out while the getting is good. Hawke and Varr-whatever are settling in, pounding on the table now in lieu of chanting aloud. There’s only an hour left before the cafe closes for the night, but he likely could have sold her on at least one more red-eye espresso before she left, and she looks just bitter enough about the disturbance that he can probably kiss any chance of a tip goodbye. But then the guy’s hand is on his, covering his, and pressing the phone gently back down to the cradle.

“Nah, nah,” he says easily. “I mean, least we can do is buy something. I’ll have, uh--”

He squints up at the chalkboard menu, one eye narrowing more than the other, and Dorian realizes suddenly that one of his eyes is made of glass. It’s an excellent prosthetic, and he wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, but he way he glares up at the blackboard like it’s personally offended him draws attention to the way half of his face lies slack. “Oooh! Vanilla-hazelnut macchiato sounds good. And, uh--”

He taps the counter with one hand, and jabs a thumb over his shoulder with the other. “Lemme go find out what these idiots want.”

Dorian nods wordlessly, ringing the macchiato into the till and leaving the bill open as he returns to the machine. The carafe with the milk for his own latte is sitting cold, as is the espresso; he tips both down the sink and rinses them out, then pulls a new shot. Over the sound of the machine running, he hears the guy call out, “Shit--can you do soy milk?”, and rolls his eyes. It’s a ridiculously frou-fou drink, something he’d expect of a bottle-blonde in printed leggings and Uggs rather than a guy twice the size of a professional football player, but he replaces the whole milk into the fridge and pulls out the carton of soy instead.

He sets another double-shot to pull for himself, and returns to the counter, where the guy’s evidently got orders from his friends. And, it seems, convinced them to shut up, which is a pleasant surprise. “A cappuccino with a shot of caramel for Varric, and a triple-shot americano for Hawke.” He’s got a credit card in one meaty paw, and taps the corner of it on the counter, ready for Dorian to enter the orders and ring up their total.

“$17.63,” Dorian tells him, and keys it into the terminal, ready to process. “And--sorry, can I get your name?” It’s second nature, asking for names to scribble on the sides of the cups, even when the cafe is empty and there’s no way he’d forget the size and shape of this particular customer; but the guy evidently takes it as something more, and he looks up at Dorian from where he’s shielding the pinpad, a slow smile stretching across his face. Oddly, Dorian finds himself looking at the glass eye rather than the real one, and he takes a small step back as he realizes the guy thinks--the guy might just think he’s flirting. “For the cup,” he adds, but it’s useless, and the guy’s smile only widens.

He looks back down at the pinpad and finishes entering his PIN number, pulling the card out when prompted and sliding it back into his wallet. “I’m the Bull,” he says, and it’s with such sincerity that Dorian can’t even find it in him to doubt it. He takes the receipt that Dorian offers him, and doesn’t say anything when Dorian fumbles it to the countertop, momentarily taken aback by the overly flirtatious tone. Dammit, but it shouldn’t be possible to _introduce yourself_ in a way that sounds so much like an invitation to get into your pants! He shoves the cafe’s copy of the receipt into the cash drawer without looking at it, and manages to get himself under control enough to tell “the Bull” that their drinks will be out in a couple of minutes.

Bull leaves the counter to rejoin his friends, and Dorian returns to the coffee bar, finishing Bull’s macchiato and quickly making up the two other drinks. He mixes his own double shot of espresso with a full carafe of chai concentrate and almond milk, stirring it together and setting it aside for later before the espresso gets cold.

It’s not until after he’s carried the three drinks out to the table that Bull, Hawke and Varric have picked out that he realizes he didn’t even bother to write the names on the cups--after making a point of asking. Thankfully, Bull doesn’t comment on it, but the way he eyes Dorian makes it obvious what he thinks of that fact. _It wasn’t just an excuse to get your name_ , Dorian tells him silently--plaintively--and knowing full well that there’s no way this guy would believe him, even if he had said it aloud.

Hawke and Varric mumble quiet apologies to him when he deposits the drinks on their table, and he just waves it off, informing them in as detached a tone as he can muster that they’re closing in twenty minutes. Hawke, still gregarious if not a little quieter, promises that they’ll be out of his hair by then; apparently they’ve called another Uber. Dorian finishes his closing duties while they sip their drinks, occasionally distracted when one of the three suddenly breaks into one team song or another, but they are surprisingly congenial customers in the end.

When they leave, and Dorian moves to bus the table, he finds Bull’s copy of the receipt stuck under his coffee cup with a phone number scrawled on it in messy print. He’s ready to just snort and dismiss it--they exchanged, what, five minutes of conversation? Granted, a hefty percentage of that _could_ be construed as flirtation, but still, he’s got more self-respect than that. Besides, it doesn’t bode well for the size of “the Bull”’s ego if he thinks he can get Dorian interested that easily. But still--curiousity piques, plucking at the strings of his consciousness, and just to see he turns the piece of waxy paper over.

His eyes definitely don’t bulge out of his head, but his eyebrows might lift--incrementally--when he sees the size of the tip Bull had keyed into the terminal. Either he’s very generous, very interested, or he’s making a comment about what he thinks the price of Dorian’s affections are.

It would be easy to be offended at the thought, that all that’s needed to get him on the line is a couple flirty exchanges and a--he does the mental math as he crumples up the receipt, and his eyebrows creep just a bit higher on his forehead-- _125%_ tip, but Dorian’s not quite jaded enough to believe it of the gregarious man. Between the genuine contrition at realization of their mistake and his otherwise easy manner, it seems more likely that Bull is just a nice guy. A nice guy who is, for whatever reason, more than passingly interested in Dorian.

He lifts a hand to his lips to smother the smile that’s threatening to bloom there, and feels the edge of the crumpled paper brush against the bottom of his moustache. He doesn’t even look at it again, but the receipt finds its way into his apron pocket, rather than the trash can. It’s not quite a decision, but it is rather nice to feel wanted; how nice, he’ll wait to decide until he’s home alone in his apartment with a glass of wine and the chance to think.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry if any of that was somewhat unpolished. I wrote it sitting behind the till at work in the space of something like an hour, just to entertain my girlfriend and our coworker, but it ended up being kind of cute so I figured I'd toss it up here.


End file.
